"100% Rails all the way, baby!"

A few years ago my wife and I each spent about a week working on a healthy recipes web portal. I have been promising myself that some day I would set aside a large block of time and make a "social network" style cooking web portal, and recently decided to just do it. I am finishing off my existing large consulting tasks, and for about 6 months plan on spending most of my time developing CookingSpace. Currently I just have a Rails place-holder at CookingSpace.us and since Carol and I are planning a lot of travel in the next few months, I will probably not have a full prototype in place until early next year.

I had been planning on using Java, JSPs, struts 2, and Hibernate Search - but decided to go with Ruby on Rails. I made this decision partly because I have been doing a lot more Ruby work than Java work in the last 18 months, and partly because I have learned some new Rails architecture tricks, and wanted to use them.

In any case, Carol and I want to create a healthy cooking web portal that will make a real positive difference in people's health and in their enjoyment of cooking and eating. I believe that the concept of seeing nutritional ingredients for recipes coupled with the ability to change ingredients on the fly and see changes in fats, sodium, vitamins, etc. will help people who either have dietary problems or simply want to eat healthier. If we end up making some money on CookingSpace that would be nice also :-)